


Past the Hag's Threshold

by brightephemera



Series: No Identification Provided [11]
Category: Planescape: Torment
Genre: Angst, Burns, Fire, Gen, Moving On, Mystery, hey let's let ignus do something, plot dump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22807405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightephemera/pseuds/brightephemera
Summary: The Nameless One got his answers from Ravel Puzzlewell. Much good may they do him.
Relationships: Ignus & The Nameless One
Series: No Identification Provided [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1474778
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Past the Hag's Threshold

**Author's Note:**

> I've been spamming the tag hard, and I mean to stop doing that. There's some awesome PS:T fic that isn't me and I don't want to drown them out. Anyway, here's what happens after Nameless gets Ravel's (mis)directions.
> 
> All _italicized_ lines are from the game.

_“Well now, my pretty thing, have you returned at last? But WHAT has returned?”_

The Nameless One pressed his palms to his eyes and dragged down. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

Morte bobbed a little more hectically than normal. “Are you kidding? I’d rate that five-star entertainment. Even the death scene was dramatic.”

“To come all this way, and reap more questions,” said Fall-From-Grace.

“To come all this way, for _that_ answer,” said Dak’kon.

“One garden…one seed…in flamesssss…” Ignus looked around them at the walls of brambles, the mad thorned streamers surrounding them on three sides. They had come to the black edge. Before them was void. Behind them was Ravel’s gardening, grown from one seed and a great deal of patience. She had something to show for her years in the Lady’s maze.

The last thing she’d ever done, against the last antagonist she’d known, save him.

_“Divided in two you were, when your mortality was peeled from you…both a blessing and a mistake…more mistake than blessing, Ravel thinks.”_

“Barmy hag,” said Annah. “She donnae know me, or yeh.”

And what part of Ravel’s needling about her passions had inspired that? Annah still had no concept of mortality. Oh, you could raise her in a cutthroat’s garbage heap and give her knives to play with, but she knew less of death than she imagined. And even less of the relentlessness of life.

That last, the thing he could not lay down. Because he had _asked_ to be like this. And Ravel Puzzlewell, who puzzled well, whose poison welled, whose raving fell, would not undo it. Even if she remembered how.

_“Can you do this, beautiful Ravel?”_

Should. This stranger in his memory, eldest and first, had forgotten should.

“She didn’t even say how long it’s been,” he said. “She must have been the only person left who remembered.”

“It is more than I knew,” Dak’kon said quietly. His _karach_ was an ongoing time-lapse blossom of black and silver.

“Well,” said Morte, “if she hadn’t gone for your eyes we could’ve asked her.”

Fall-From-Grace looked thoughtful. “Or if you had been more conciliatory.”

“I won’t call the witch who did this to me beautiful.”

“Even if she is a match for yeh,” muttered Annah.

 _“What can change the nature of a man?”_ Through years or ages Ravel had asked, and he felt the impressions of the people who failed her like whispers sheathing her bladed words. Yes, all these people in her path had failed. Because it was his answer, the answer of the Nameless One, her momentary yet deathless love, that she waited for.

And he had come, and given it. And they were no wiser.

“Regret,” he murmured. “Oh, you have no idea.”

_“Our life is a means by which we learn *how* to die. If we FORGET such things…”_

She hadn’t completed the sentence. Well, neither could he.

He knew the way out of this maze, if he could trust her word. He did. She had cared for him, even if she no longer remembered why. He knew the way, and he knew there was someone out there who had seen his mortality. His mystery had shifted. It had contracted, just a little. It was enough to hope.

“I, too, could go for standing perfectly still and staring all day,” said Morte. “I don’t need to blink. You, on the other hand…”

Nameless shook himself. “All right. We should go.”

“She said there will be no coming back,” said Fall-From-Grace.

“Then we go together.” He touched the three black-barbed seeds in his pocket. He would save these. As for the rest…“Ignus?”

“Yessss?”

At last, a gift fit for the smoldering corpse. “Burn it all.”

Ignus threw his head back and flared a fiery wreath. Nameless's damping charm shattered. Flames roared to the masses of black bramble and gamboled, galloped, groped into the thorns. Ignus laughed, dripping fleshy embers, and floated into the maze while it turned wildfire.

“No one will know,” said Nameless, feeling aspects of himself finally starting to relax.

“Save us,” said Dak'kon. The fire faltered in the dark of his eyes.

“Save you,” Nameless echoed slowly. “We should go.”

“Without him?”

“Dak'kon, I don't know how much worse it gets. I may yet need him.”

Dak'kon inclined his head without comment. Moments later, borne on a searing thrust of wind, Ignus returned from the thorns. They crumbled to ash in his wake, but flames billowed high in thickets behind him.

His cracked and blackened mouth was smiling.

“Everywhere…the flamesss…bright to the ground, bright to the sssky….”

“You've already scorched most of it. We have to move on.”

Ignus reached out. “Flamessss…you….”

Nameless stood his rapidly warming ground. “Follow,” he said. “Don't wait too long.”

“Burnssss…sssmoke like perfume….”

The air was hot and sooty. “I know. Come, when you're done.” If he was ever done. Nameless wanted him to obey, but he didn't mean to die here at the hands of someone who couldn’t be separated from his toys.

_“What do I need that lies beyond my brambled walls? It is a cruel, jagged world beyond the edges of this maze…”_

“Faugh, that's nae much of a jump,” Annah said, very loudly.

Nameless came to the black edge beside her, as much to be moral support as anything. He thought about taking her hand. He didn't. Still, they were here, and here lay his path: forward at last. Morte, Fall-From-Grace, and Dak'kon joined them, side by side, cheek by ossified jowl.

“Well,” said Nameless, while the brake behind him snapped and roared. “Nowhere to go but forward.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have used “save” twice as both “except” and the imperative of “preserve.”


End file.
